Status Skill Marketing

Nick Wreden at Marketing Profs.Com introduces a neat new idea, status-skill marketing.

The idea is simple enough. People have always sought status symbols -- a Rolls Royce, a bottle of vintage wine, a suburban mansion -- to show off and impress others.

In our society of knowledge workers and creative and innovative idea shapers and instant millionaries, however, it is a lot cooler to know how to do something than just to own something. Hey, everyone can OWN something. But what can you DO with it, dude?

Japan airlines now includes Japanese lessons among its entertainment options on overseas flights. You no longer impress folks with that trip to Japan, but you sure might when you hop from the plane and start chatting away in Japanese?

Wine dealers are offering courses in wine tasting. Sports car dealers are giving away lessons in race driving. Art dealers are teaching buyers the fine points of building collections. They are not just selling the status symbols but tying their sales to the much more impressive sophistication in their use.

According to Wreden, "one study claimed that 20% of consumers who learn a skill based on a product will buy that product, 65% will buy that brand again, and a mouth-opening, eyebrow-raising 96% will tell a friend about the experience."

Now a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and nothing would be worse than a transparent veneer of sophistication. We all know what we thought about that little know-it-all in seventh grade. So in order for status skills to work they have to penetrate at least a bit below the surface.

This is where university-based "executive" programs might enter the market. You can only learn so much Japanese on that overnight trip to Tokyo, or so much art history from the dealer advising you about the current post-impressionist market. Most instant millionaires, however, would not be caught dead in typical university-based continuing education courses, which are either based on regular university courses for your teenage daughter or shaped for the elderhostel crowd.

So keep an eye out for upper-end executive "status skill" cohort programs coming soon to a campus near you.

Harvard Says it Will Focus on Teaching, Sort Of.

A Harvard Task Force, led by renowned social theorist and Dean Theda Skocpol, has called for a renewed focus on teaching. The report called for sweeping institutional change, including, "continuing evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning"

The report also proposes that teaching be weighed equally with research in annual salary adjustments. Skocpol says that outsiders are always surprised to learn that teaching doesn't count at all in judging faculty peformance.

But then there is the bit where you take it back.

"The aim of the report is not to de-emphasize research in any way, but to bring about a greater institutional focus on teaching," one of the task force members explained.

Let's see now: we're going to get a lot of "sweeping change" and "continuing evaluation and assessment" and a "greater institutional focus" -- but not to worry --we won't be de-emphasizing research in any way.

Could you run that by me one more time?

The New 'A' Student: Excelling Through Intimidation

Tim Ferriss, in his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich advises students to follow his work smarter, not harder advice:

“For all four years of school, I had a policy. If I received anything less than an A on the first paper or non-multiple-choice in a given class, I would bring 2-3 hours of questions to the grader’s office hours and not leave until the other had answered them all or stopped out of exhaustion. This served two important purposes:

1. I learned exactly how the grader evaluated work, including his or her prejudices and pet peeves

2. The grader would think long and hard about ever giving me less than an A. He or she would never consider giving me a bad grace without exceptional reasons for doing so, as he or she knew I’d come a’knocking for another three-hour visit.

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time."

Congress, College, and Copyright

According to Inside Higher Education,
"A bipartisan group of House of Representatives lawmakers said Wednesday (May 2)that they had written the presidents of 19 colleges and universities asking their officials to complete an expansive survey on the use of their campus networks for illegal downloading of copyrighted music, video or other digital content. "

19 universities were asked to document the extent of the illegal downloading problem on their networks, what they were doing to curtail the "theft" of copyrighted materials, and interestingly, what they were doing to promote “legitimate services as alternative sources for copyrighted materials.”

That is, the higher education institutions are being pressed not only to stop file sharing but aggressively to market i-tunes and similar commercial services to their students.

File sharing may violate legitimate copyright protections. But the serious theft has been perpetrated not by college students but by the congress, paid off by media giants, and with a wink and a nod from the supreme court.

The purpose of copyright is to provide some monopoly protection for writers and artists, for a short time, in order to provide a monetary incentive to create works of interest and value to the public. The entire point is to create a steady stream of such goods that will soon enter the public domain.

But the current law puts creative products into the hands of media conglomerates more or less in perpetuity. No one living can expect these goods to enter the public domain in their life times. Hence it is quite reasonable for them to regard the current copyright law as illegitimate. It is a small step from that for them to justify downloading of recent creative products, in violation of what anyone on reflection would consider to be a legitimate legal constraint.

My question is whether the universities, which in the emerging academic capitalist paradigm are themselves beneficiaries of these distorted copyright provisions, will simply fall in line to this congressional pressure or stake out a sensible position on a copyright regime that their students are willing to respect and that they are willing to police?